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Since 2011, the Pipeline Safety Trust has conducted an annual review of each state regulatory agency’s pipeline safety website. Our goal is to encourage states to make information about pipeline safety — like inspection records, incident data, maps, etc. — as transparent to the public as possible.

Availability of inspection records, and incident, enforcement and excavation damage data; and

Information about siting and routing of new pipelines.

The graphic below shows how states performed in our 2017 review. We consider below 17 points to be “failing” (red), 17-24 points to be “passing” (yellow), 25-32 points to be “good” (light green), and a perfect score of 33 points is “excellent” (dark green). California has two entities responsible for pipeline safety; one agency has a score of “good” while the other has a score of “failing.” States and territories in black have no pipeline safety program.

Map of the results of our 2017 transparency review. Dark green and light green states have “excellent” and “good” websites. Yellow states have “passing” websites and red states have “failing” websites. Note: California PUC, which is responsible for gas pipelines received a score of “good” in the 2017 review while California Fire Marshal, which is responsible for hazardous liquid pipelines received a score of “failing.”

For some states, seeing their state in red is enough to force them to act. For others, a drive for excellence catalyzes website improvements. For years now, Arkansas and Washington have led the pack, getting perfect or near-perfect scores every year. Last year, they were joined by Nevada, which achieved a perfect score for the first time.

This year, however, we decided public shaming isn’t always the best way to get states to improve their website transparency. So, we offered a free website audit, including detailed recommendations for improvements, to any state that wanted to participate. Fifteen states signed up in time to receive an audit and make changes before the 2017 review.

Among those 15 states, three have already taken our recommendations to heart and made significant changes to their websites. The California Public Utilities Commission made notable improvements to their site after our audit this year, bringing them from the middle of the pack to the top. Colorado also asked for an audit and worked closely with us to improve their website in 2017, leading to a much more user-friendly, transparent site. And, New Hampshire amped up an already fine website, adding information about siting and routing and better access to some data. We hope other states we have worked with will make similar changes in the coming year as time allows.

While not all the states for which we conducted audits incorporated our recommendations, we are pleased with the outcome of this effort, and will continue to offer audits into 2018. In 2016, we had 19 states with a score of “passing” or better. Now have 21 states with passing scores or better, and next year, we’re shooting for 25.

Do you have questions about our transparency study or how to get an audit for your state? Contact Kate Blystone at kate@pstrust.org for more information.

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The Pipeline Safety Trust is available to help interested communities and individuals comment on proposed rules or other official proceedings having to do with pipeline safety.

Over the next year, we will be announcing public comment opportunities, providing summaries of the proposed rules or proceedings, and developing a guide to how pipeline safety rules are made. We are also available to help local governments and citizens understand pipeline safety proceedings and help get people to pertinent workshops, meetings or events.

Right now there are proposed changes to the information collected from pipeline operators for the National Pipeline Mapping System. If the proposed changes are finalized, the accuracy of the maps will improve and many new pipeline attributes will be collected (size of the pipeline, operating pressure, etc.). However, most of the information collected about pipelines will be kept out of the hands of the public and even out of the hands of local government and emergency officials if passed as proposed by DOT’s Pipeline and Hazardous Safety Administration (PHMSA). Comments are due by November 25, and can be submitted by clicking on the “Comment Now!” button on this link.

Our concerns and comments are summarized here. Most importantly, we think that in areas where pipelines are located, local communities are important allies in pipeline safety, and information about pipelines should be readily available to them. If this reflects your own view, then PHMSA needs to hear this from you because they will not hear it from others. Pipeline operators and industry associations are frequently the only ones to weigh in on official proceedings regarding pipeline safety. When the Trust comments, we often find ourselves being the only one focused the “public” interest. But of course there is more than one public perspective. We hope you will consider submitting your own comments on this important issue by clicking “Comment Now!” on this link.

Proposed rule change for hazardous liquid pipelines

In addition to the National Pipeline Mapping System changes, PHMSA has also published draft changes to rules about hazardous liquid (oil) pipelines. We will be blogging about this later; for now you can see the article in our recent newsletter.

And please let us know if you’d like to be kept informed about future opportunities to comment.

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Did you know we recently updated our briefing papers and added papers on three additional topics? These papers are a great source of ‘Pipeline Safety 101′ information – they are short and each focused on a single topic. They do not need to be read in order, though some basic understanding is helpful before reading about the more technical issues. Check them out if you haven’t already! Here is the full list:

The Trust published a Request for Qualifications in 2015, asking those with technical expertise in a whole range of pipeline safety issues to submit their information to us. Community organizations, local governments and individuals frequently ask the Trust for suggestions of independent technical experts with experience in engineering who can provide paid technical assistance in a broad variety of areas relating to oil and gas pipelines. They seek general advice, as well as specific advice related to pipeline conceptual design, construction methods, corrosion, pressure cycling, materials, electrical interference, air quality, mechanics, chemical impacts, siting safety, inspection techniques, leak detection, repair methods and a host of other topics.

In order to provide an array of options to these local governments and community groups, we undertook this RFQ. Inclusion in the directory does not imply endorsement by the Trust. We appreciate those who responded to our request, and recognize how difficult it can be for communities to find independent experts able to provide unbiased information and advice. If you are someone seeking an expert, please have a look at our new listings here. If you are an expert, feel free to contact us to request inclusion in the future.

I began working in earnest for the Trust two years ago. Recently, I received a phone call from a timid citizen looking for support as he tried to educate himself in the midst of a pipeline construction project coming his way. He asked this question, and it offered me a brief opportunity to reflect on our work.

Do you remember 1999? If you lived in Bellingham, you know exactly where you were on June 10th of that year. Exactly where you were when an ominous and huge mushroom cloud rose into the clouds from the fireball that occurred after a 16” pipeline ruptured in a city park, sending a quarter million gallons of gasoline down a salmon creek, and subsequently igniting and causing an enormous explosion. Three kids died. Kids died and a salmon stream was wiped out because of negligence, poor management, lack of oversight and near nonexistent regulations.

So we remember. Sixteen years later, we remember these kids, and think about the 252 others who have died since 1999 in pipeline tragedies. We remember this disaster, and think about the 4,476 other significant pipeline incidents that have happened since 1999. It’s not easy to keep these issues on the forefront, especially when the oil & gas industry spends $141 million in a single year lobbying to keep their perspective on top.

We are not anti- or pro- pipelines. We are pro-safety, and work to make pipelines safer so human and environmental tragedies can hopefully be averted. Our board is very careful about where Trust funding comes from, and has been wise in investing the original endowment in a way that still makes our work possible.

In the Trust’s early years, it was difficult to access any information about pipeline safety. Now the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) has a good website with more information than we can easily digest. We annually glean and assess the transparency of each state’s pipeline safety information, and hope that through this we push the bar higher and encourage more and more information about pipeline safety to be easily accessible to people who are affected by pipelines.

Our website too has grown, and offers a wide variety of information, tools, and educational materials to anyone looking for it.

Part of our work is asking questions and bringing up difficult issues so they can be talked about openly, as we try to do every year at our conference that draws about 200 people from the pipeline industry, the federal and state regulatory community, and every-day citizens or local government representatives who care about these issues and how they impact their local community. The kinds of in-person public conversations that occur at our conference do not happen anywhere else; it’s a unique opportunity for diverse stakeholder discussions about pipeline safety issues.

If you are affected by oil and gas pipelines, I hope you find the Pipeline Safety Trust helpful, join us in pushing the safety bar upward, and have confidence that what we provide is truly credible, independent, and in the public interest.

Question of the week – I think it was around this time in 2009 that a gas pipeline blew up in Palm City, Florida near a school. What really happened then, and have things gotten safer in the past 6 years?

On May 4, 2009, an 18-inch Florida Gas Transmission Company interstate pipeline ruptured about 6 miles south of Palm City, Florida, releasing about 36 million cubic feet of natural gas and causing three minor injuries in Martin County. The community was fortunate: the gas did not find a source of ignition and catch fire, nor did two other large gas lines buried parallel to the one that ruptured sustain any damage, though 106 feet (over 5,000 pounds) of buried pipeline was blown into the air and landed in the right-of-way between two major highways. The pipeline segment that failed was between two automatic shutoff valves, but only one closed in response to the pressure drop on the pipeline. A Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system was in use by the pipeline operator at its control center in Houston, TX to remotely monitor and control the movement of gas through the pipeline. The SCADA system also failed to recognize the rupture or trigger any alarms.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued a pipeline accident brief on this incident, which found the cause of the accident to be the operator’s failure to detect cracking of the pipeline beneath protective coating. The NTSB also found that the operator failed to correctly identify the pipe as being within a high consequence area even though it was near a school.

As with most pipeline incidents, there were many contributing factors to this incident. The operator subsequently changed operations and procedures related to this pipeline in response to a PHMSA corrective action order as reported by the NTSB. But here, in response to the question about whether things have gotten safer in the past 6 years, we will focus on the issue of high consequence area (HCA) identification.

If the pipeline segment had been correctly identified as being within a high consequence area, then it would have been included in the pipeline operator’s integrity management program. There are specific rules in the federal regulations requiring the implementation of integrity management in high consequence areas, and these include specific inspection, analysis, maintenance and repair criteria designed to detect problems such as those that caused this 2009 incident.

As to whether these same mistakes could be happening today, the answer is yes. Are things safer? It’s hard to say. The same rules that allowed the identity and location of HCA’s to be kept secret from the public in 2009 are still in place. The public can’t know, until after an incident, whether an operator has accurately identified the HCAs along its route.

A fundamental problem is that PHMSA essentially leaves the designation of high consequence area (HCA) boundaries up to the pipeline operators, and entrusts them to update the boundaries when any changes take place that would trigger a new inclusion in the HCA. There is no way for an average citizen to know about the details of these HCA boundaries, to know if PHMSA is enforcing the designation of those areas, and no way to help ensure operators encapsulate what needs to be included within those boundaries according to the regulations.

For example, on a gas transmission line like the one in Florida that ruptured in 2009, the presence of certain populated areas would trigger the HCA designation. There is a complicated way for gas pipeline operators to choose their method of designation and draw their boundaries (see 49 CFR §192.903). Put generally, any area near a pipeline with a high population (for gas pipelines, that means 20 or more homes), or with a populated activity center (e.g. school, office, assisted living, recreation area, campground, etc.; referred to as “designated sites” in the gas regulations), would be considered part of an HCA. Just how near to the gas pipeline these homes and activities need to be to trigger the HCA designation depends on how big the pipeline is, and the pressure inside it.

So what if a community is building a new school? Or what if a development goes in within a half-mile of an existing pipeline? In the case of a hazardous liquid (e.g. crude oil or petroleum) pipeline, nearby town water intakes or environmentally sensitive areas also trigger the HCA designation – what if a town changes their water intake or an agency recognizes a new critical habitat area? These types of changes and development happen all across the country, but only a very few communities have practices or rules in place that facilitate active dialogue between a pipeline operator and developer, or between an emergency management team and pipeline operator, to the degree that these types of changes are promptly reflected in a pipeline operator’s integrity management program.

In fact, PHMSA rules allow over 10 years – yes, TEN YEARS – from the time a natural gas pipeline operator identifies HCA changes to when that information must be part of a completed baseline assessment of the pipeline in the newly identified HCA. And PHMSA rules allow over 6 years from the time a hazardous liquid pipeline operator identifies an area of high population or sensitivity, to when that information must have been incorporated into its completed pipeline assessment. And the time between the actual on-the-ground change and the identification of that change by the pipeline operator adds even more time – a vague amount of time as this type of information analysis is only required by the operator ‘periodically.’

Contrary to some who think pipeline information needs to be less accessible, we think the secrecy surrounding pipeline operator’s designations of high consequence areas (HCAs) and other withheld information leads to more risky pipelines. If communities could access this type of information easily, it would be easy for planners, emergency responders, and concerned citizens to inform pipeline operators when a change is needed – thereby leading to SAFER pipelines, not more risky ones. Our experience is that those most impacted by pipelines – those who live in close proximity to them, are the ones with most at stake and most interested in keeping the pipelines and their community safe. Withholding information from these stakeholders disregards critical allies in our collective efforts toward safer pipelines.

Despite the lack of a transparent playing field in this area, there are some things you can do.

Communities with active Local Emergency Planning Committees (LEPC) often have regular open meetings, and the committee itself should include representation from community groups as well as emergency response professionals, elected officials, professional staff, and facility and pipeline operators. The emergency responders who participate in these meetings have the ability to access information from pipeline operators that the general public cannot access. Pipeline operators are required to share their emergency response plans with local first responders, and to maintain liaison with appropriate fire, police, and other public officials. Citizens can participate with the LEPC and request the committee work on accurate identification of HCAs in partnership with the pipeline operator. The LEPC topic is addressed in more detail in chapter 5 of our Local Government Guide to Pipelines.

PHMSA maintains a web-based National Pipeline Mapping System (NPMS), which is viewable on a county-level and depicts the location of hazardous liquid and natural gas pipelines, along with population areas and other information. While the population areas may give some indication of where a high consequence area is likely to be designated, there is not a direct link between the NPMS information and what the operators currently use to designate their HCAs. The PHMSA information is not up to date, and does not include the level of detail or environmental information needed to truly assess HCA boundaries. This is a problem. There are periodic opportunities for the public to comment on this issue, as the Trust did in December 2014 and October 2013 (comments of the Trust on a variety of pipeline safety topics are viewable here). The public needs to be able to view information and data gathered from pipeline companies on NPMS that depicts pipeline locations within an HCA with a high level of accuracy. There is in fact a statutory requirement that HCAs be incorporated as part of NPMS and updated biennially.[1]

Lastly, the Palm City, Florida incident was one of the incidents the NTSB highlighted in their recent safety study published earlier this year entitled “Integrity Management of Gas Transmission Pipelines in High Consequence Areas” and discussed in our January 30 Smart Pig blog post. This study included a number of additional changes needed to help make pipelines safer over time.

Question of the week – There are rumors of a new pipeline coming to my community. I’ve heard of another town with its own pipeline ordinance, but I also hear that it’s not up to the community and we really have no say. Should we pass our own ordinance and will it help?

You can pass your own ordinance, but whether it will help or not depends on where you are, what type of pipeline is proposed, and what the ordinance says.

It is true that in some circumstances communities “have no say,” but not all. There are a few circumstances over which the federal agencies have exclusive authority: FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) has exclusive authority over the routing of new interstate natural gas pipelines; and PHMSA, the federal pipeline safety agency, retains authority over rulemaking and enforcement of safety regulations governing oil and natural gas pipelines. States can seek certification from PHMSA to regulate the safety of intrastate pipelines, and once certified can write stronger regulations for those pipelines than the federal minimum regulations established by PHMSA. States can take on a stronger role in other areas as well – but that is a subject for another post. If not disallowed by the state, local communities can have an important role when it comes to land use and pipelines.

For situations where local rules are not preempted by other state or federal laws, there are a number of options for action:

When a pipeline is built, the pipeline operator typically needs to get road crossing permits and negotiate franchise agreements or easements for crossing public roads, using road rights of way or crossing parks or other land owned by the local government. Some communities do this as they need to, and others have an ordinance that governs all these types of franchise agreements or easements between the town/county and the pipeline operator. This type of ordinance typically avoids preemption issues with state or federal law, though we recommend consulting with an attorney in your area. Franchises can address things like notification to the local government, maintenance of the right-of-way, availability of information, required payments by operators, circumstances where relocation of the pipeline may be necessary (and who would pay for it), pipeline abandonment, insurance and financial guarantees, and other issues. For examples of franchise ordinances, see the Franchise page on our website.

There are also community ordinances that establish a setback or consultation area between the pipeline and certain development, homes, or businesses. There are no federal regulations that set an absolute minimum distance that a pipeline can be built from a house, so a number of communities have moved forward on their own to do this. One option is to establish a ‘consultation zone’ so the pipeline owner and property owner or developer of any new project have to talk with one another prior to going ahead with the development or the new pipeline. Another option is to pass an ordinance requiring setbacks that vary depending on what type of residential uses exist near the pipeline. We have examples of these types of ordinances as well on our website.

Setbacks are often intended to help prevent damage to the pipeline by people doing something stupid on top of it (like installing a swimming pool or fence), or to aid in evacuation by offering a bit more time for folks to get out of the area. But they are likely not wide enough to protect a person from an explosion on a high pressure pipeline (for larger diameter high pressure gas pipelines, that distance may need to be over 1,000 feet).

A local government could also choose to treat new pipelines as a conditional use and require a pipeline proponent to apply for and receive a conditional use permit before beginning construction within the jurisdiction. You can find an example of this option on our website as well (see Colorado example).

Chapter 4 of our Local Government Guide describes in more detail options that local communities have as they think about how best to prepare for the prospect of a new pipeline coming to town.

Question of the week: I’ve looked at some of the pipeline enforcement data online through PHMSA’s website, but don’t really understand it, and don’t see a lot of information available. Can you tell me how pipeline enforcement works, and what is available to the public when there is an enforcement case against a pipeline operator who has some sort of violation of the rules?

Answer:

This question produced deja vu for us here. It turns out our very first newsletter in 2005 included on article on this topic, so we decided to have a look to see what had changed in the past 10 years. The article was about how the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), Office of Pipeline Safety (OPS) civil fine enforcement works and why OPS should make it more transparent. While OPS has improved some things (like its percentage of assessed penalties that are eventually collected), the substance of the issues has not changed at all, and enforcement procedures still occur largely behind closed doors with only the regulators and industry present, and no public record of proceedings.

How It Works

OPS enforcement procedures are complex. In simple terms, there are three stages:

Investigating — reaching a preliminary conclusion whether a company violated the law. This can happen as a result of an inspection or an incident.

Proposing a fine — notifying the company of the allegation and what the fine could be.

Hearing/Assessing/Collecting — giving the company an opportunity to present its views; deciding what the fine will be; collecting it.

The time from the first to the last step may take more than a decade. Meanwhile, there is no public input and the availability of documents is limited. According to the enforcement statistics,[1] over the past ten years OPS collected about 84 cents for every dollar of fines it proposed (up from less than 50 cents when we published the article nearly 10 years ago). These statistics leave out millions of dollars in fines that were proposed but never or not yet collected because cases either never made it to the final collection phase or still have unresolved compliance issues.[2]

What is most troubling to us is the way in which fines are reduced or unresolved. Without any public access, the pipeline operator goes behind a closed door with government officials and comes out paying less money than originally owed. What goes on behind that door? No one knows. PHMSA has made improvements in providing enforcement information in the last 10 years, and usually provides access to the corrective action order, the operator’s response or request for a hearing and the final order through links on its enforcement web page. However, between the time an operator requests a hearing on a penalty case and PHMSA issues a final order, none of the documents or arguments made in the enforcement hearing process are posted for public review, and PHMSA neither publishes notice of hearings nor allows the public or members of the press to attend if they happen to learn when a hearing is scheduled. Nor is there a requirement for a record of the hearing to be made, let alone made public. This is the stage where most of the reduction in proposed penalties occurs, and the public can only hope to be able to read between the lines of a Final Order to determine why the penalty was reduced and whether the reduction was legitimate.

The Need for Transparency

In this country, after the investigatory stage, law enforcement takes place in public for good reasons. Public scrutiny enhances credibility, accountability and fairness while preventing even the appearance of government corruption in the following ways:

Credibility — seeing OPS expeditiously enforce its regulations would instill confidence that safe operation is a requirement rather than a guideline.

Accountability — if companies successfully challenge fines because regulations are poorly crafted, the public could demand better rules.

Fairness — secret proceedings deny the public an opportunity to question fines and permit operators to make one-sided arguments without fear of rebuttal.

Prevention of corruption — while no one is suggesting that OPS is corrupt, any government agency that permits fines to be whittled down behind closed doors is just asking for trouble from a suspicious public.

How It Should Be

OPS should create an Internet accessible enforcement docket, like the existing DOT rule-making docket, where the public could view enforcement as it progresses. The docket would include the OPS Notice of Probable Violation, Corrective Action Order or other enforcement documentation, the company’s responses, documents exchanged between the parties before and during a hearing, transcripts of hearings and the final decision. OPS should permit intervention by aggrieved parties. The hearing dates should be on the docket, and the hearings themselves should be open to the public and members of the press.

When pipeline operators violate the law, they endanger the public. Therefore, the public has an interest in seeing operators held accountable. Open and transparent enforcement procedures would enhance public confidence and permit the public to work with OPS to make pipelines safer.

Question of the Week: I heard something about grants being offered to communities for hiring experts and promoting public participation in pipeline safety proceedings. Can you tell me more about how to access these funds?

Answer:

PHMSA recently announced a grant opportunity for Community Technical Assistance Grants – Applications are Due April 22, 2015.

Community groups and local governments are eligible to apply for PHMSA Technical Assistance Grants (“TAG grants”) of up to $100,000 for technical advice on pipeline concerns, to enhance public involvement in official proceedings on pipeline safety, for production and implementation of local pipeline ordinances, or for a wide variety of other pipeline safety related projects. You can find an archive of the nearly 200 projects funded with these grants in past years here.

The TAG program provides funding to communities for technical assistance and analyses of local pipeline safety issues. Technical assistance is defined as engineering or other scientific analysis of pipeline safety issues. The funding can also be used to help promote public participation in official proceedings. However, the funding may not be used for lobbying, in direct support of litigation, or for activities associated with regulatory compliance or typical operations and maintenance of pipeline facilities. Local projects can range from public awareness activities to technology solutions, such as the conversion of paper maps into electronic format. The awards have funded a broad range of activities, including:

o Improvement of local pipeline emergency response capabilities

o Improvement of safe digging programs

o Development of pipeline safety information resources

o Implementation of local land use practices that enhance pipeline safety

o Community and pipeline awareness campaigns

o Enhancements in public participation in official proceedings pertaining to pipelines

If you intend to apply for a grant, the preparation for doing so (obtaining online accounts and numbers and entering your proposal in the online system) takes quite a bit of effort and time, so plan accordingly to allow enough time before the deadline to get help if you need it.

We’re happy to help give you feedback on your TAG idea, or talk to you about what some other communities have done, so feel free to contact us for more information if you’re interested.

Background on the TAG Grants

When Congress began working to strengthen the nation’s pipeline safety laws in 2001, the forerunner of The Pipeline Safety Trust pushed for the creation of a federal program that would provide money to local governments and communities for hiring independent experts. These experts would help them obtain information so they could be informed and active participants in decision-making activities about pipelines running through—or proposed for siting in—their communities.

In the Pipeline Safety Improvement Act of 2002, Congress authorized the Technical Assistance Grant (TAG) program, which was based on a successful Superfund grant program that had been operating within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency since 1988. However, Congress did not appropriate any program funds when it passed this law. Over the next four years, Congress failed to fund the TAG program, and the Office of Pipeline Safety (OPS), which is within the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), didn’t move ahead to implement it. Consequently, the Pipeline Safety Trust worked with supporters in Congress to break this “logjam” and a provision was inserted in the Pipeline Inspection, Protection, Enforcement and Safety Act of 2006 to withhold funding from other activities until PHMSA established procedures and criteria for initiating the TAG program. In 2008, Congress provided $1 million in the federal budget for funding this program and in 2009 the Pipeline Safety Trust helped OPS develop criteria for evaluating grant applications.

Reporters ask us a lot about numbers, and we see both accurate and misleading figures being thrown around in the press and even on unnamed official websites, so we’re expanding here on our February 10 blog post that touched on numbers. That post mentioned both numbers from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) and industry numbers published recently by API/AOPL (American Petroleum Institute / Association of Oil Pipe Lines) in their Pipeline Safety Excellence (PSE) initiative “Pipelines by the Numbers.” A fundamental concern the Trust has with these industry numbers is the lack of transparency about where their numbers come from.

The federal government through DOT- Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) collects information from pipeline operators annually and on incidents that occur (annual data and incident data, respectively). This data is fairly comprehensive and publicly available. PSE uses data from their own secret Pipeline Performance Tracking System (PPTS) with no public access to this data. The “Pipelines by the Numbers” report does not tell the reader what filters are used to pull the numbers, or why they differ so from the PHMSA incident data.

The data used by the Trust is typically based on PHMSA 20-year pipeline significant incident trends. In this example, we filtered that for onshore hazardous liquid (HL) pipelines (accessed on Feb 25, 2014), as we’re comparing our numbers to those of the liquid pipeline industry (API/AOPL). The Trust relies on the ‘significant incident’ dataset (rather than ‘all incidents’ or ‘serious incidents’) because we think it provides the most honest and transparent reflection of the incidents that show shortcomings in pipeline safety regulations and in operator safety cultures. Serious incidents only capture information when a death or serious injury occurs, and many catastrophic incidents are left out because the environmental destruction or personal property damage incurred is not enough to warrant the ‘serious’ categorization. The significant incidents dataset includes all incidents with $50,000 or more in total costs, measured in 1984 dollars, and including the value of the lost product; it also includes all serious incidents, any hazardous liquid release of 50 barrels or more, any HVL release of 5 barrels or more, and any liquid release resulting in a fire or explosion. We do not generally use the ‘all incidents’ dataset that captures the smaller accidents that occur, because reporting criteria for what a reportable incident is has changed quite a bit over time and can result in seemingly odd fluctuations when looking at all incidents.

We’re going to use this space to compare what we see in the PHMSA numbers, to what the hazardous liquid pipeline industry has published through their API/AOPL PSE initiative “Pipelines by the Numbers.” For shorthand purposes, when we say the word “industry” below in this post, we are referring to the hazardous liquid pipeline industry and the numbers put forth by API/AOPL.

Industry states 99.999% of all hazardous liquid products are delivered safely each year, equating to all but .001% of the 14.9 billion barrels delivered in 2013. That means 5,009,524 gallons (we use PHMSA numbers here, but using industry numbers it would be 6,258,000 gallons) were spilled in 2013 in hazardous liquid pipeline incidents. (This is the one time we do use the ‘all incidents’ dataset to portray the volume that does, in fact, NOT get delivered safely each year.) Even if we filter the data for only the significant incidents, that figure remains close to 5 million gallons (4,978,706 gallons) spilled that year. By way of comparison, that’s equivalent to five spills the size of Marshall Michigan just for the volume spilled in 2013.

2 FACT:Greater than 67% of incidents since 2002 were caused by things within the operator’s control.

PHMSA collects incident data from operators, including a designation of what caused the incident, and that information is posted on PHMSA’s website. Among the causes are several that are entirely within the operator’s control: Corrosion, Incorrect Operation, Material/Weld/Equipment Failure, and Excavation Damage by the operator or its contractor. Together, these incident cause categories account for an average of 75% of all incidents since 2002 being within the operator’s control (1,622 total significant incidents from 2002-2014; 1,214 of those caused by things within the operators control). And things are not improving over time: every other year since 2002, more than 2/3 of significant incidents have been caused by things within the operators’ control.

3 FACT:315 million residents are at risk of pipeline failures.

Industry reports that 315 million US consumers and workers benefit from pipelines daily – roughly the US Census population. Both are hyperboles adding nothing to what should be an important discussion about pipeline safety.

Industry states a 50% DROP in incidents from 1999-2013. Frankly, we have no idea where they got this number, unless they only considered incidents that occurred off company property on Sundays (we’re kidding, kind of). 1999 had the highest number of significant pipeline incidents between 1995-2012 (142), so it was a convenient year to begin if looking to find a drop, but even starting at that relatively high point, there has been a 13% increase in significant hazardous liquid pipeline incidents.

5 FACT:119 people killed or injured by onshore HL pipeline incidents since 1999 and $2.4 billion in property damages from pipeline spills in the past 10 years.

These are numbers they’d rather you not think about, preferring instead some variation of “everything is awesome”.

Again, industry points out how much money the industry spends on pipeline maintenance and safety initiatives; and yet the industry spends 14 times the amount on lobbying than HL operators spend on pipeline safety research and development in any given year. Is “getting to zero” as important as “influencing” politicians?

Under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, HL pipeline operators are required to produce an ‘oil spill response plan’ or ‘facility response plan’ that details their preparations for a spill and submit this plan to PHMSA every 5 years. Only 1.5 PHMSA staff members are assigned to review these plans that cover 192,000+ miles of pipelines, the lowest by far of any of the four agencies who review these types of plans. The low staffing level results in PHMSA failing to require unannounced drills, as is required.

8 FACT:Corrosion caused more incidents in each of the last 3 years than in any year since 1997.

Industry claims that corrosion-caused pipeline incidents are down 75% since 1999. What??! PHMSA tracks corrosion as a cause (out of 7 overall cause categories) of incidents. We simply don’t understand where the industry claim could have come from. See for yourself; we’ve included the PHMSA data below so you can see both the numbers and percentages of incidents caused by corrosion each year. It’s remained a fairly steady 25%, but of late the total number of corrosion-caused incidents has been higher, not lower, than in previous years.